A composite of “Examples of Dignity” (Guardian, 2008) and my introduction to the electronic edition of Saramago’s novels (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), along with reviews of Seeing (Guardian, March 2006), and The Elephant’s Journey (Guardian, July 2010).
My friend the poet Naomi Replansky wrote me that she was reading a great novel, Blindness, by José Saramago. I knew he had been awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize, but it was Naomi’s judgment that moved me to trot out and buy a copy.
I was a bit put off by the first page when I saw the eccentric punctuation. Saramago likes run-on sentences, eschews quotation marks, and is loath to paragraph. Punctuation seems to me one of the few human inventions without bad side-effects, and I am so fond of all the little dots and curls that I once taught a whole writing course devoted to them. So a Saramago page, one dense thicket from top to bottom with only commas to indicate the path, was hard going for me, and I was inclined to resent it.
And soon, as I pushed on through the thicket, I began to get scared. The story was, to put it mildly, a nightmare. Tough-minded thrillers I’d read were custard sauce to this. The idea of everybody in a city suddenly going blind, not all at once but at random over several days, is fairly horrible in itself; Saramago’s even, quiet narrative tone brings the horror home as he describes it through the eyes (all too literally) of one ordinary person after another. Despite or because of governmental efforts at control, the city soon begins to break down—cars driven by blind drivers, fires in homes, panicky soldiers faced with panicky citizens. A disused mental hospital where the early blind are locked away very soon becomes a hellish concentration of the worst that terror and weakness can bring out in people—bullying, enslavement, gratuitous cruelty, rape. . . . At this point I stopped reading the book. I couldn’t handle it.
To read on, to be willing to read about terrible cruelty, I had to trust the author unquestioningly, the way one trusts Primo Levi. I had to know that Saramago was not merely putting on a horror show, exploiting his power over his readers. I was quite ready to admit the power, his Dostoyevskian gift for communicating suffering, but I needed to trust him enough to let him tell me this fearful story in the confidence that he’d make it worth enduring. The only way to find out if he deserved such trust was to read his other books. So I did.
That is, I read all of them I could get in English. Saramago writes in Portuguese, his native language. Exploring his novels, I found out a little about the man himself; he tells us as much as he feels we need to know in his fine, honest, eloquent, reticent Nobel lecture. Born in 1922 to a peasant family, he went barefoot till he was fourteen. His maternal grandparents kept six pigs, their livelihood; on cold nights they brought the weaker piglets into their bed. Poverty forced him out of college-track schooling into trade school, and he worked some years as a mechanic before he could begin to follow his literary vocation. He writes in the Nobel lecture of “[c]ommon people I knew, deceived by a Church both accomplice and beneficiary of the power of the State and of the landlords, people permanently watched by the police, people so many times innocent victims of the arbitrariness of a false justice. . . . I haven’t lost, not yet at least, the hope of meriting a little more the greatness of those examples of dignity proposed to me in the vast immensity of the plains of Alentejo.”
He became, and is, a communist. When he was forty-four he published his first book of poetry; he wrote for various papers and published editorials and essays, and also worked for years as a translator, putting writers as various as Colette and Tolstoy into Portuguese. In the 1980s, in his sixties, he was able to turn his full energy to writing novels; the first of these, Baltasar and Blimunda, was an international success, and he hasn’t had to look back since then. He has paid a price among some critics for his outspoken criticism of Israel’s U.S.-backed policies, though critics often seem to ignore his politics, shrugging off the notion that anybody now could seriously hold to socialist principles. Indeed it takes a man of intransigent character to do so. But he is not really a political novelist, and anything but preachy. His themes are complex, both earthy and elusive.
My course of reading—The Late Ricardo Reyes (also published as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), The Stone Raft, The Cave, and several other books (of which more later)—was entirely successful. I returned to Blindness and began it again from the beginning, by now used to the thickets and confident that wherever Saramago took me, however hard the going, it would be worth it.
Others may not find the book as frightening as I did. Too many novelists, like too many filmmakers, cram their stories with ruthless violence gloatingly described, seeking to violate a shock threshold that grows ever higher, using cruelty to sell their books, to “thrill” readers who have been trained to think that nothing is interesting but “action,” or to keep their own demons at bay by loosing them on other people. And too many realists, following the principle that if it isn’t ugly it can’t be true, are as alert as fire wardens to make sure any glimpse of decency or gleam of hope is promptly extinguished. Siding more with Keats on this point, I generally avoid such fictions—hence both my liking for nonrealist writers and my initial reluctance to trust Saramago’s painfully ugly story. Those inured to fictional brutality and blood-spattered film screens will lack my squeamishness about horrors they take for granted. That is a pity, because they will not have the experience I had in finally reading Blindness straight through, which was of a genuinely miraculous rising up out of awful darkness into a clear, truthful light.
I say miraculous not intending to suggest any supernatural intervention; that’s scarcely Saramago’s line. He is generally polite about God, and his novel about Jesus is affectionate towards Jesus, though he judges Jehovah as a hanging judge should be judged. He looks for no help from Heaven. In the dark story of Blindness, the thin glimmer of light is that of a solitary human soul trying to do the right thing. She can do right, protect her husband, only by doing wrong, by lying. She pretends to be blind like everybody else, but she is not, so she must witness unbearable horrors. Behind her dilemma stands the old, cynical adage “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” H. G. Wells wrote one of his best and strangest tales to disprove it. Saramago develops the disproof yet further, and makes of it as powerful a moral novel as has been written in the past fifty years. To me it is almost unbearably moving, and the truest parable of the twentieth century. It completely changed my idea of what literature, at this strange time of paralysis in crisis, can be and do.
Saramago died in the summer of 2010, at eighty-seven. That fall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published an electronic edition of his novels, and it’s fitting that they should have such an edition, a virtual presence, for it was Saramago who in one of his blog posts first spoke of virtual literature—a fiction that “seems to have detached itself from reality in order better to reveal its invisible mysteries.” He credits Jorge Luis Borges with the invention of this genre, but he himself brought to it the one quality of greatness that Borges’s fictions lack: a passionate and compassionate interest in ordinary people and everyday human life.
We probably don’t really need any more categories, but virtual literature might be a useful one, differing from science fiction and speculative fiction with their extrapolative bent, fantasy with its wholly imagined realities, satire with its meliorative indignation, magic realism which is indigenous to South America, and modernist realism with its fixation on the banal. I see virtual literature sharing ground with all these genres, as indeed they all overlap, yet differing from them insofar as its aim is, as Saramago put it, the revelation of mystery.
In his books, this is revelation of the most secular and unpretentious kind—no grand epiphanies, only a gathering and slow arrival of light, as in the hour before sunrise. The mystery revealed is that of daylight, of seeing the world clearly, the mystery that happens literally every day.
Saramago wrote his first major novel when he was over sixty, and finished his last, Cain, a little before he d
ied. I have to go on speaking of him in the present tense, he lives so vividly in his writings, these works of a “senior citizen,” our patronizing euphemism for the dreaded words “old man.” His extraordinary gifts of invention and narration, his radical intelligence, wit, humor, good sense, and goodness of heart, will shine out to anyone who values such qualities in an artist, but his age gives his art a singular edge. He has news for us all, including old readers tired of hearing the young or the wannabe young telling us the stuff we used to tell everybody when we were young. Saramago has left all the heavy breathing decades behind him. He has grown up. Heresy as it may seem to the cultists of youth, he is more than he was when he was young, more of a man, a person, an artist. He’s been farther and learned more. He has seen most of the twentieth century, and has had time to think about it, decide what matters, and learn how to say it. The energy and mastery with which he says it is a marvel. He is the only novelist of my generation who tells me what I didn’t know, or rather, what I didn’t know I knew: the only one I still learn from. He had the time and the courage to earn that subtle and unpretentious kind of understanding we call, inadequately, wisdom. But it’s not the glib reassurance often labeled wisdom. He’s anything but reassuring. Though he doesn’t parrot the counsels of despair, he has little confidence in that kindly trickster, hope.
Radical means “of the root,” and Saramago was a deeply rooted man. Accepting the Nobel Prize in a king’s court, he spoke with passion and simplicity of his grandparents in the plains of the Alentejo, peasants, very poor people, to him a lifelong, beloved presence and moral example. His love for his native country is the motive force of his Journey to Portugal, the only nonfiction work in the electronic anthology. A detailed guidebook of travel through the land from north to south, it is also a voyage of discovery, of rediscovery, a journey (back) to the country from which he was self-exiled for years in protest against the religious bigotry of its government. He was radically conservative in the true meaning of the word, which has nothing to do with the reactionary quacking of the neocons, whom he despised. An atheist and socialist, he spoke out, and suffered for, not mere beliefs or opinions, but rational convictions, formed on a clear ethical framework which could be reduced almost to a sentence, but a sentence of immensely complex political, social, and spiritual implication: it is wrong to hurt people weaker than you are.
His international reputation has suffered most from his steadfast opposition to Israeli aggression against Palestine. His demand that Israel, remembering the suffering of the Jews, cease to inflict the same kind of suffering on their neighbors has cost him the approval of those who conflate opposition to Israel’s aggressive policy with anti-Semitism. To him religion doesn’t enter into it, while Jewish history simply supports his argument: it is a matter of the powerful hurting those weaker than they are.
Saramago famously said, “God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.” He isn’t often so dramatically epigrammatic. I would describe his usual attitude to God as inquisitive, incredulous, humorous, and patient—about as far from the ranting professional atheist as you can get. Yet he is an atheist, anticlerical and distrustful of religion, and the potentates of piety of course detest him, a dislike he cordially returns. In his fascinating Notebook (blog posts from 2008 and 2009) he castigates the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who, as he says, legalized pederasty by legalizing marriage for girls of ten, and the Pope of Rome, so reluctant to condemn pederasty among his priests—again, a matter of the powerful hurting the defenseless. Saramago’s atheism is of a piece with his feminism, his fierce outrage at the mistreatment, underpayment, and devaluing of women, the way men misuse the power over women given them by every society. And this is all of a piece with his socialism. He is on the side of the underdog.
He is without sentimentality. In his understanding of people, Saramago brings us something very rare—a disillusion that allows affection and admiration, a clear-sighted forgiveness. He doesn’t expect too much of us. He is perhaps closer in spirit and in humor to our first great European novelist, Cervantes, than any novelist since. When the dream of reason and the hope of justice are endlessly disappointed, cynicism is the easy out; but Saramago the stubborn peasant will not take the easy out.
Of course he was no peasant. He worked his way up from ancestral poverty and a job as a garage mechanic to become a cultivated intellectual and man of letters, an editor and journalist. For years a city dweller, he loved Lisbon, and he deals as an insider with the issues of urban and industrial life. Yet often in his novels he also looks on that life from a place outside the city, a place where people make their own living with their own hands. He offers no idyllic pastoral regression, but a realistic sense of where and how common people genuinely connect with what is left of our common world.
The most visibly radical thing about his novels is the aforementioned punctuation. Like me, readers may be put off by his use of commas instead of periods and his refusal to paragraph, which makes the page a forbidding block of print, and the dialogue frequently a puzzle as to who is speaking. This is a radical regression, on the way back to the medieval manuscript with no spaces between the words. I don’t know his reason for these idiosyncrasies. I learned to accept them, but without enthusiasm. His use of what teachers call “comma fault” or “run-on sentences” induces me to read too fast, so that I lose the shape of the sentences and the speech-and-pause rhythm of conversation. When I read him aloud I have little difficulty, probably because it slows me down.
Grant him that quirk, and his prose (which I know through his splendid translator Margaret Jull Costa) is clear, cogent, lively, robust, perfectly suited to narrative. He wastes no words. He is a great storyteller (again: try reading him aloud), and the stories he has to tell are not like any others.
Here are some brief notes about them, reflections on my own process of learning how to read Saramago, an education by no means completed.
Baltasar and Blimunda, published in Portugal in 1982, earned prompt acclaim in Europe. A wild historical fantasy full of such unexpected and unpredictable elements as Domenico Scarlatti, plague, the Inquisition, a witch, and flying men, it is odd, charming, funny, teasing, and tells an endearing love story. To me it seems a warmup for the greater novels to come, but it made his reputation, and many hold it to be among his best.
Of all his books, I have the most difficulty with The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. This is Saramago at his most intellectually Borgesian, and perhaps at his most Portuguese. It asks of the reader, if not some knowledge of its subjects (the writer Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese literary culture, the city of Lisbon), at least a fascination with masks, doubles, and assumed identities, a fascination Saramago certainly had and I almost entirely lack. A reader who shares that fascination will find this (and later The Double) a treasure.
Of his next book, in his Nobel speech he says simply, “In consequence of the Portuguese government censorship of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), vetoing its presentation for the European Literary Prize under the pretext that the book was offensive to Catholics, my wife and I transferred our residence to the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries.” Most men who leave their homeland in protest against tyrannical bigotry go off shouting, pointing their fingers, shaking their fists. He just transferred his residence. I confess that the subject of the book is not of the highest interest to me, but it is a subtle, kind, and quietly unsettling work, an outstanding addition to the long list of Jesus novels (which may begin, as the title of this one implies, with the Gospels themselves).
The Stone Raft is science fiction, a lovely novel that had the very rare fortune of being turned into a lovely movie, made in Spain. Europe cracks apart at the Pyrenees, and the Iberian peninsula drifts wonderfully, cataclysmically off past the Canary Islands towards America. Saramago takes full advantage of this opportunity to make fun of the impatient and impotent pomposity of governments and the media when faced with events beyond the scop
e of bureaucrats and pundits, and also to explore the responses of some obscure citizens, “ordinary people,” as we call them, to the same mysterious events. This one of his funniest books. And here also we find the first important Saramago dog.
There is a dog in Blindness too. Nobody in the book has a name, and the dog is known only as the dog of tears. He is an unforgettable dog. There is, I believe, a dog in all of Saramago’s best books. His dogs embody a deep, essential element of his stories. They do not tell us what it is since they cannot speak; their silence is part of their importance. I’m not sure why I tend to rank his novels with a dog in them higher than the ones without, but it may have something to do with his refusal to consider Man as central in the scheme of things. The more people fixate on humanity, it sometimes seems, the less humane they are. I have learned, whenever I begin a new Saramago, to hope for the arrival of the dog.
Next—he was in his seventies now, and writing a novel every year or two—comes The History of the Siege of Lisbon. The first time I read it, I liked it but felt stupid and inadequate, because it is or appears to be about the founding event of Portuguese history, and I know no Portuguese history. I was reading too carelessly to realise that my ignorance made no difference at all. Rereading it, I found that of course everything you need to know is in the novel—the “real” history of what happened in the twelfth century when the Christians besieged the Moors in Lisbon, and the “virtual” history that comes to be interwoven with it, through the change of a single word, a no to a yes, a deliberate mistake introduced into a new History of the Siege of Lisbon by a proofreader in Lisbon in the twentieth century, one Raimundo Silva, who wants to subvert the authority of “historical truth.” Raimundo is “a simple, common man, distinguished from the crowd only by believing that all things have their visible sides and their invisible ones and that we will know nothing about them until we manage to see both.” Raimundo the proofreader is the hero of the story (and the love story), and that alone was enough to win my heart.
Words Are My Matter Page 17